ANDRE BROCHU: 'Mourn but organize for change'

When we were seated in geoemetry class we didn’t begin. Instead there was an announcement over the public address system that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas. It wasn’t long after that it was announced that the President was dead . We were kept in school until the end of the afternoon session but all instruction was cancelled.

By Andre Brochu

The Patriot Ledger, Quincy, MA

By Andre Brochu

Posted Nov. 23, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated Nov 23, 2013 at 11:14 PM

By Andre Brochu

Posted Nov. 23, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated Nov 23, 2013 at 11:14 PM

» Social News

On November 22, 1963 sophomores like myself at Brockton High School started in the early afternoon because of double sessions. In the corridor between English class and geometry class there was some commotion. There was something about the governor of Texas. My first thought that was that he was in Brockton. Maybe classes would be suspended and we would soon be on our way to the auditorium to welcome and hear Governor Connolly.

When we were seated in geometry class we didn’t begin. Instead there was an announcement over the public address system that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas. It wasn’t long after that it was announced that the President was dead . We were kept in school until the end of the afternoon session but all instruction was cancelled.

I walked home in the dark. My mother was home ironing clothes in the kitchen with a TV on the floor as the casket was being transferred from Air Force One to a hearse. That was a somber weekend watching the news and ceremonies. The innocence of our youth was gone. The murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy only made things worse.

With the transition of power Lyndon Johnson was able to implement a wide spectrum of political and economic reforms. Whatever promise Kennedy had initiated and Johnson carried out it was overshadowed by Vietnam. The buildup started under Kennedy continued and escalated after the intermezzo in the Tonkin Gulf and the election of 1964. Neither listened to an unsung and by many forgotten war hero, Marine Commandant David Shoup.

Whether Kennedy would have withdrawn military advisors from Vietnam is a matter of conjecture. Lyndon Baines Johnson enacted the most significant federal programs since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. If Kennedy had not been assassinated Johnson still would have been indispensable for negotiating with and convincing the Congress on enacting reforms. A year earlier there were negotiations at the time of the Cuban missile crisis which were lacking completely in the increasing involvement in Vietnam. At that time the Soviet Union removed the missiles from Cuba while the US removed nuclear devices which were on warplanes minutes from Soviet territory.

As an advisor and retired military officer David Shoup warned more and more for widening US intervention globally. David Shoup is hardly known or mentioned today. If Kennedy and Johnson had listened to him things might have been different. Kennedy was murdered and within a few years Lyndon Johnson was a broken man despite his extensive reform program. The quagmire in Southeast Asia doomed the New Frontier and the Great Society while it cost 60,000 American lives and an estimated 2 million Vietnamese lives. Kennedy had inspired us adolescents and Johnson was starting to implement the vision that Franklin Roosevelt had. It all came to an abrupt end. Events during the next 10 years are still being felt today. A friend was killed in 1967 and recently one of our classmates died at least partly due to exposure to Agent Orange.

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They should have listened to Commandant Shoup. If someone were to write a sequel to Kennedy’s book, “Profiles in Courage,” it should contain a chapter about David Shoup. This brilliant officer, war hero and recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor dared say what others didn’t dare to :

“I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-soaked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own — and if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the “haves” refuse to share with the “have-nots” by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don’t want and above all don’t want crammed down their throats by Americans. ” (David M Shoup 1966).

Those are the thoughts I would like to share with other classmates from BHS Class of 1966 and others. Mourn the loss of JFK but organize for change. I am a resident of Malmoe, Sweden. I voted with my feet in 1970. I had been in Canada and knew enough about the country. It might have been more natural but in the fall of 1970 the War Measures Act’s implementation in Canada because of FLQ terrorism and the kidnappings made Toronto and Montreal less attractive.

I am proud to say that in the summer of 1965 in the spirit of The Great Society I served with the Commonwealth Service Corps in Roxbury. We were tutoring young kids in reading skills and spent the rest of the time house painting (that was before I contracted my fear of heights ).